Digital Painting: Masking 101 (3 of 3) The Magic Wand Tool - Photoshop Selections. Written by Steve Patterson. The Magic Wand Tool, known simply as the Magic Wand, is one of the oldest selection tools in Photoshop. Unlike other selection tools that select pixels in an image based on shapes or by detecting object edges, the Magic Wand selects pixels based on tone and color. Many people tend to get frustrated with the Magic Wand (giving it the unfortunate nickname "tragic wand") because it can sometimes seem like it’s impossible to control which pixels the tool selects. In this tutorial, we’re going to look beyond the magic, discover how the wand really works, and learn to recognize the situations that this ancient but still extremely useful selection tool was designed for.
Selecting The Magic Wand If you’re using Photoshop CS2 or earlier, you can select the Magic Wand simply by clicking on its icon in the Tools palette. The Magic Wand is nested behind the Quick Selection Tool in Photoshop CS3 and later. The “Magic” Behind The Wand Tolerance Setting the Tolerance value to 0. Feather Selections In Photoshop With Quick Mask. I want to apply a vignette effect to this photo of a young couple: The original image. If we look in my Layers panel, we see that my photo is sitting on a layer that I've creatively named "Photo", and the photo layer is sitting above a white-filled "Background color" layer which will serve as the background for my vignette effect.
The photo layer is selected and active: The Layers panel showing the photo sitting above a white-filled background. I'll grab my Elliptical Marquee Tool from the Tools panel by clicking and holding my mouse button down on the Rectangular Marquee Tool, then selecting the Elliptical Marquee Tool from the fly-out menu that appears: Selecting the Elliptical Marquee Tool. With the Elliptical Marquee Tool in hand, I'll drag out an elliptical selection outline around the area in the center of the photo that I want to keep: An elliptical selection outline has been drawn around the couple in the center of the photo. Going to Select > Modify > Feather. The Quick Mask Mode. Alpha mask textures blending into the background. Alpha mask background trick I've seen this problem more than once on CG forums: somebody has made a nice alpha masked texture, but the blending looks a bit odd.
Lets take this leaf for example (colour texture and alpha shown side by side): A nice clean alpha, should look great in 3D. But look at what happens when it's applied on a plane in your favourite 3D application: At first view it looks nice, but when you zoom in you can see a nasty black halo around the edge of the leaf. It's not looking too good now, but when rendered or used in a game engine it'll probably look much worse. Luckily the solution is pretty simple: just fill the background with the same colour as the leaf, so when the alpha blend the polygon to transparent the colour doesn't change: Now the transition is perfectly smooth: Pretty easy, but what about texture where there is a more of color variation? First, make a copy of your colour texture as it will be masked. Now apply a Gaussian Blur of about 2 pixels on this layer:
Photoshop Masks – Part One. A Beginner’s Guide to Photoshop Masks – Part One Recently I have received many emails and comments about the use of Layer Mask techniques in Photoshop. I thought it might be the time that I write an article specifically explaining the relevant areas you know about layer mask, and how you can apply it in different occasions to suit your needs. In Part One of this Beginner’s Guide to Photoshop Masks, I will show you some basic information about masks and simple way of adding, deleting and painting on layer mask. A Brief Overview of Photoshop Mask I’m sure everyone here knows what a Mask is and what it is used for in real life – it hides things so people can’t see what is behind the mask.
In Photoshop, there are two types of Masks – Layer (Pixel) Mask and Vector Mask. By definition (extracted from the Adobe Help Centre): In this tutorial, I will focus on talking about the use of Layer Mask as a starting point of beginners. Where Can I Find the Masking Options? Additional Masking Options.